Week 7 re-cap – Allison

I can’t believe that this was the seventh week of class. Wednesdays have become my favourite day of the week simply because I know I’ll be making some delicious food with some really great people — this week was no exception.

The theme for this week’s class was overseas-inspired party fare. However, with no recipes sent beforehand, we came into class with no clue what we would be making. To our delight, it turned out to be potstickers, Thai salad rolls, and hummus. Already we were looking forward to what the night had in store.

The very first thing we learned how to do was roast red peppers. It was an extremely thrilling event; we got to watch the red peppers burn on an open flame. Lots of Instagram pictures were taken as the peppers went from bright red to pitch black. After that, we all got to practice our knife skills as we all prepped the vegetables for the salad rolls and potstickers, which I really appreciated.

As someone who grew up with a mom who made her own potstickers (and still does, as evident by the bags of frozen dumplings in our freezer), it was really interesting to learn how to make them myself. I’ve assembled some myself (poorly, I must add), but as the one with “the most experience” regarding this dish, I was called to teach everyone else how to assemble the potstickers in the wrappers. Well, I must say that although I did end up wrapping a pretty mean potsticker, everyone was a pro at it. Some did end up a bit wonky looking , which we all had a good laugh over, but overall we made some pretty good looking dumplings. They didn’t disappoint in the taste department either. I am even going to make the claim that they rivaled my mom’s dumplings in tastiness (although don’t tell her that). There were definitely none left over by the time we were done class. I think everyone agreed that it was just absolutely amazing how easy it was to make the dumplings, considering just how good they were.

After the potstickers we learned how to make salad rolls, which is also incredibly easy. After soaking the noodles in some hot water, and then the paper rice, we got to pick and choose the vegetables we wanted in the roll, and threw in some shrimp and noodles. The only tricky part was rolling them up, but as soon as we figured that out, we rolled up some impressive salad rolls. Jacinthe whipped up a quick peanut sauce to spread on the salad rolls and they tasted like perfection.

We saved the hummus until very last because it was very quick to make. We got a bag of tortilla chips from the Co-op and chomped on them dipped in the hummus. Needless to say, we all had food babies after this class was done.